Matthew Frye Jacobson

Odetta's One Grain of Sand (33 1/3 Series) by Matthew Frye Jacobson is yet another insightful addition to the 33 1/3 series from Bloomsbury Academic. This one, perhaps more than any of the others I have read, serves as much as a much needed biographical work as well as a study of this album within the context of the civil rights movement.

First, for those unfamiliar with this series, let me say something about it. Each book is based on an album but each is distinct in its approach. Some are more personal than others while moving outward from that to the world at large. Some focus on each song and the production of it, yet never loses sight of the time period within which it was made. What none of them are, based on the ones I've read, is simply a rehash of an album and the associated studio sessions. Even the Siouxsie and the Banshees volume, while highlighting where the record was made, still extends beyond a basic telling of the sessions themselves. This approach yields an amazing number of new perspectives even on albums and artists you're very familiar with, and serves as wonderful introductions to those you aren't.

When I saw this I dug out my CD of the album and listened to it again for the first time in about 15 years. I did this before starting the book and I'm glad I did, it reminded me just how powerful her voice and delivery were. I was fortunate to see her a couple times many years ago and each time sent chills through me. She was just that impressive. So I came to this book with some knowledge of who she was and what she did.

Jacobson chooses four songs on which to structure the book, each representing one aspect of the African-American experience after emancipation. The album was released in 1963, the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and a watershed year in the civil rights movement and the country as a whole. He focuses on the songs Midnight Special (her as archivist and the area being the prison), Cool Water (representing the coffeehouse, the sight of folk music's political activity), Moses Moses (the church or the spiritual geographies), and Cotton Fields (the plantation or social geographies).

For each song or area, Jacobson discusses both how Odetta interpreted the song and made it her own as well as the history that it speaks to. It is here that we see connections between how a song can have one meaning when we read the lyrics and yet another based on how the song is delivered. By placing this in the context of the period and of the civil rights movement, we understand how and why Odetta's performances are so moving. They do, and should, anger as well as shame members of the audience. She is both telling a personal story in each song (actually two, hers and the subject of the song) and a people's story. To not be moved is to not be fully human, I think.

There has been a shortage of good books about Odetta and I was fortunate to also be reading a book coming soon from Beacon Press, Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack. To my knowledge this will be the first true biography of her.

I recommend this to any fan of music, especially those who like to read about the dynamics between music and social/cultural commentary. The number of artists who have cited Odetta as a major influence run the gamut from Joan Baez and Bob Dylan to Rhiannon Giddens and Miley Cyrus, with the Kinks and Carly Simon thrown in.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (mais)

In Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew Frye Jacobson examines how the variegated white races merged in the public consciousness into Caucasians from the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. He argues, “The contest over whiteness – its definition, its internal hierarchies, its proper boundaries, and its rightful claimants – has been critical to American culture throughout the nation’s history, and it has been a fairly untidy affair” (pg. 5). Further, Jacobson writes, “Becoming Caucasian, then, has been crucial to the politico-cultural saga of European migration and settlement, and the process by which this came about touches the histories of every other racially coded group on the American scene” (pg. 8). Jacobson concludes that whites’ successes and stability both arrived at the expense of non-white groups. He draws primarily upon the elements of mass culture, from articles in Harper's Weekly to public speeches to novels and even popular scientific texts in the period he examines.
Jacobson identifies capitalism and republicanism as the two forces that shaped whiteness in the United States (pg. 13). According to Jacobson, while the Revolutionary generation tied race to republicanism on the grounds that only free people could fully participate in democracy, the tie between the two grew stronger through the nineteenth century (pg. 30). The eventual “fragmentation and hierarchical ordering of distinct white races (now in the plural) was theorized in the rarified discourses of science, but it was also reflected in literature, visual arts, caricature, political oratory, penny journalism, and myriad other venues of popular culture” (pg. 41). Jacobson writes of one particular example, “Racialism thus provided a powerful frame for interpreting and explaining Irish immigrant behaviors of all sorts, and for rearticulating at every turn the unbridgeable chasm separating narratives (Anglo-Saxons) from immigrants (Celts)” (pg. 48). Later, nativism and “the exclusionary logic of the 1924 [immigration] legislation represented not a new deployment of race in American political culture, but merely a new refinement of how the races were to be defined for the purposes of discussing good citizenship” (pg. 87). Like the immigration legislation, legal rulings played a key role in shaping whiteness.
Jacobson writes, “To become ‘Caucasian’ in the 1920s and after…was not simply to be ‘white’…; it was to be conclusively, certifiably, scientifically white. ‘Caucasian’ identity represents a whiteness discovered and apprehended by that regime of knowledge whose cultural authority is greatest” (pg. 95). Following World War II, culture dominated notions of race rather than biology, with a focus on how races related to one another (pg. 98). In the realm of popular discussions of race, Jacobson writes, “In 1944 a sixteen-year-old black student in Columbus, Ohio, won an essay contest on the theme ‘What to Do with Hitler after the War’ by submitting the single sentence, ‘Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America” (pg. 112). Further, Jacobson writes of Harper’s, “Race seems among the organizing principles of the worldview at once demonstrated and reinforced by the magazine’s format” (pg. 161). Most stories discussed the white races in terms familiar to their audience, spreading the ideology of a hierarchy of whites. This, however, changed with the expansionism of the late nineteenth century.
Jacobson writes, “Continual expansion and conquest pulled for a unified collectivity of European ‘white men,’ monolithic and supreme, even while nativism and the immigration question fractured that whiteness into its component – ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ – parts” (pg. 204). By the time of the early Civil Rights Era, “the emergent race politics of the 1930s and after dramatically heightened the salience of ‘Caucasian’ identity by imploring whites to dwell upon their whiteness and to work toward the eradication of its unjust privileges” (pg. 248). Jacobson concludes, “If race as a conceptual category is indeed a theory of history, then race as a perceptual category embodies that history in all its complexity and contradiction” (pg. 142).… (mais)

Jacobson examines the concept of whiteness, beginning with the first restrictions on citizenship in 1790 (free white men) and tracing through how it changed into the twentieth century. Essentially, his argument is that whiteness continually changed to be more inclusive in response to the presence of a large clearly non-white population, usually blacks or Chinese. Initially, only Anglo-Saxons were white, but it gradually came to include other northern Europeans. By the twentieth century, it included southern Europe as well. Jacobson demonstrates the changing nature of the definition of white as the circumstances of the country changed. By WWII, it established the perceived racial dichotomy of black and white, with literally no shades of gray.… (mais)

How the Irish Became White and Whiteness of a Different Color challenge the biological and static nature of racial categories by demonstrating that race, particularly the white race, is in fact a socially and historically constructed category open to multiple and shifting meanings. Both texts dispel any lingering notions of American idealism that attempt to locate the origins of this country in egalitarianism or color-blind equality by illustrating how in fact, this country’s legal, political and social history is premised on the equation of whiteness with privilege. Noel Ignatiev does this through his case study of Philadelphia Irish in the nineteenth-century, an immigrant group that fled victimization in Ireland. Ignatiev makes the case that the Irish were not perceived as “white” upon arrival in the United States, but had to gain entrance into the white race through a series of choices which most significantly included the oppression of African-Americans. Mathew Frye Jacobson does this through his sweeping historical account of the shifting formulations that whiteness and the superior status it denotes takes from colonial times through the civil rights movement. Analyzing an impressive array of sources ranging from naturalization and immigration law, court cases, novels and writings on eugenics, Jacobson primarily focuses on the transformation of various immigrant groups from nineteenth-century biologically designated white racial others to twentieth-century scientifically sanctioned Caucasians.
In contrast to scholars such as David Roediger and Theodore Allen who have focused on “class and economics as the primary movers of race” (18), Jacobson explores, “national subjectivity and national belonging-as they both inflect and are inflected by racial conceptions of peoplehood, self-possession, fitness for self-government and collective destiny” (21). Whiteness of a Different Color demonstrates the ways in which the meaning of whiteness has been historically contested in the United States, and is organized according to “three great epochs of whiteness”. Jacobson documents cultural shifts from 1790 until the 1960s in which a multi-racial system of white races, defined in opposition to the Anglo-Saxon white race, ultimately are subsumed within the category of Caucasian. He argues that during the nineteenth century a biologically based system of “racialism” prevailed whereby the white ethnic groups of today - Italian, Jewish, Slavic, etc.- were then understood to be distinct races. This system, premised on people’s position within a hierarchy based on perceived inherent differences, was a dominant and organizing ideology governing U.S. political and social relationships.
According to Jacobson the question is not how the Irish or Jews or Italians became white, but how they could be defined as both white and something other than white. For, as he significantly points out, immigrant groups had to somehow approximate the category of white in order to enter the country. Jacobson explains that it was both the inclusivity and the exclusivity of the language of the 1790 Naturalization Law, which limited entrance and citizenship to “free white persons”, that allowed unlimited entrance to European immigrants while denying entrance to Asian immigrants. However, whether or not a particular white racial group possessed the criteria for “fitness for self-government” became highly contested by the 1840s with the Irish Famine Migration and the large growing German immigrant population. At this point Jacobson locates the shift to the second epoch of racism or “whiteness”, “from the unquestioned hegemony of a unified race of “white persons” to a contest over political “fitness” among a now fragmented, hierarchically arranged series of white races” (42-43). During this time of heightened European immigration Jacobson points to the rise in American nativism and its interrogation of whether or not certain white groups should be granted citizenship. He locates the third epoch of whiteness or racism in 1924, when the Johnson Act, a product of the “science” of eugenics, went into effect in order to restrict immigration to Nordic races. Ironically, Jacobson writes, “But in “solving” the immigration problem, the Johnson Act laid the way for a redrawing of racial lines, and so that year does mark the beginning of the ascent of monolithic whiteness” (93). From 1924 to 1965 Jacobson argues that the hierarchy of multiple races was reformulated into three categories: Mongoloid, Negroid and Caucasian. The events precipitating this shift in racial perception included a decrease in immigration due to the Johnson Act, the eugenic policies of Nazi Germany, and significantly, the massive migration of African-Americans to the north and west, and the rise of Jim Crow laws. This new system transformed a system exclusively based on racial hierarchy into a system of ethnicity, whereby white races were now seen as ethnic groups subsumed within the category of Caucasian. The three major racial divisions were now seen as products not of biological difference but of differing cultural and environmental factors. Jacobson points out that these racial shifts don’t mean that one regime or epoch was fully supplanted by the other, often simultaneous racial systems coexisted. Finally, Jacobson concludes that the race politics of the civil rights era further consolidated white people (now white ethnics) under the umbrella of “white” as the nation became polarized over issues of black-white relations.
How the Irish Became White brings the discussion of whiteness back to its connection with class in its case study of working-class Philadelphia Irish in the nineteenth-century. Ignatiev’s study, organized across six chapters, seeks to answer how the Irish, an oppressed group in Ireland came to become an oppressing group in the U.S. He locates the answer in their willingness to choose whiteness and its inextricable privileges at the expense of solidarity with African-Americans. In doing so, Ignatiev seeks to illuminate the subject of race within the context of the New Labor History, arguing that exclusion of African-Americans contributed to the formation of the white working-class. Unlike Jacobson who insists that the Irish, Jews, Italians, etc. were viewed through the lens of a white otherness, Ignatiev makes the point more provocatively that the Irish were in fact not thought of as white at all but had to gain admittance into the white race, a process which emphatically shores up the malleability and constructedness of race itself. An interesting piece of evidence which effectively exemplifies the degree to which Irish were not perceived as “white” comes from his analysis of the situation in the Philadelphia Walnut Street Jail. Ignatiev finds no reference to segregation by color in the minutes of The Board of Directors or the notes of the Prison Society. While the primary inmates of the jail were African-Americans and Irish, he argues that it is very difficult to determine whether or not and how segregation by race may have taken place. Strikingly, while relations between Irish and African-Americans were not positive outside of prison walls, within the jail there were no recorded instances of black/Irish strife. Ignatiev explains that the prison experience points to “the weakness of ‘race’ as a social definition within the prison” (51).
Ignatiev also argues that the policies of the Democratic Party and the practices of labor organizing are primarily what enabled the Irish to assimilate into white America, and not what some scholars believe was their ability to speak English. Prior to the Irish Famine Migration, Ignatiev explains, not all Irish immigrants were poor, Catholic or spoke English. They assimilated, or as Ignatiev argues, became white, because they bought into the white supremacy of the Democratic Party. Unlike the Republican Party’s adherence to American nativist restrictions on voting rights, the Democratic Party, consistently reduced voting restrictions for “white” men, enabling the majority of immigrant men access to the franchise. Through its rejection of the Republican Party’s American nativism, the Democratic Party, “established an acceptable standard for “white behavior” and “created the white vote” (76). In addition, Ignatiev looks at the development of labor and finds that the Irish effectively pushed African-Americans out of work in order to rise within the ranks of white labor. He argues that in order to do this, the Irish had to maintain color-based distinction regarding “black” and “white” man’s work whereby the Irish ensured that no black man could do the same work that they did. Relying on some inconclusive evidence, particularly with regard to his discussion of the Manayunk textile mill, Ignatiev nevertheless concludes that the Irish’s familiarity with the mill system, “their willingness to work for low wages” combined with their refusal to work with African-Americans rendered factories “as ‘white’ preserves” (115). Subsequently, Ignatiev makes the case that labor unions themselves became bastions of “whiteness” where the Irish continued to learn and participate in whiteness, while African-Americans continued to be pushed out of work and were often labeled as strikebreakers, that category of worker anathema to unions.
Jacobson provides us with a much broader overview of the ways in which immigrant groups became white while Ignatiev provides us with a close and focused analysis of one particular immigrant group’s process of becoming white in a particular place. This enables Ignatiev to facilitate a comprehensive accounting of the emigration and immigration of the Irish, in which we learn about the experience of the Irish under the British Penal Laws and the race-based oppression they experienced in Ireland. Jacobson’s scope is wide so we don’t get to know any particular group’s history as richly as Ignatiev’s Irish. However, in the chapter “Looking Jewish Seeing Jews” Jacobson provides if not a case study then a complex analysis of the ways in which Jews have historically been visually apprehended as something other than white. Jacobson, while resisting a class-based approach to race, nevertheless provides a thorough and seemingly all-encompassing understanding of the political and social implications denoted by the absorption of European immigrants by the Caucasian racial category. He does not suggest as Ignatiev does that such a transformation occurred due to the nearly calculated oppression of African-Americans by white ethnics. However in his Epilogue he importantly emphasizes that while in today’s multicultural climate many white ethnics might wish to argue that they “are not really white”, they need to recognize that their whiteness enabled them admission into the U.S. Furthermore, it entitled them to certain legal and economic rights that were consistently denied to African-Americans, Chinese immigrants and Native Americans.
In addition, both authors, while they each chart the rise of whiteness at different historical moments, do attribute much of its monolithic prevalence to circumstances involving African-Americans, such as migration, Jim Crow, and various forms of political and social oppression. They each argue that this resulted in polarizing the nation into essentially two races, black and white, which subsumed all other European immigrants into the category of white, or, as Jacobson would have it, Caucasian. Whiteness of a Different Color and How the Irish Became White importantly address the white supremacist roots of this country and impart an important lesson to their readers in recognizing the historically intimate connection between whiteness and privilege. In telling the story of whiteness and those that chose or were fortunate enough to find themselves gaining admission to the white race, Ignatiev and Jacobson expose race as a fabrication.… (mais)